Re: secondary password files

> Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> >> It's a pretty crude hack, since there isn't any support for updating
> >> the secondary password files except via manual editing done by the
> >> dbadmin.  But I wouldn't be in favor of taking it out until we can
> >> replace that functionality elsewhere.
> 
> > We have pg_passwd which does allow updating of the files.
> 
> Say again?  I see a pg_shadow table and a pg_user view of it.
> No pg_passwd table.
> 
> Since pg_shadow can't hold more than one password per user, it's
> fundamentally incapable of supporting this function.

There is a pg_passwd binary in /bin.

> 
> If we wanted to handle this better, I'd be inclined to remove passwords
> from pg_shadow (then the need for a separate pg_user view would go away)
> and make a pg_passwd table holding <username, dbname, password> triples
> with some provision for an "any other db" wildcard.  (Not dbname = NULL,
> because we'd want to treat <username, dbname> as primary key.  Maybe
> dbname = '*' would be OK.)  There'd need to be two flat files for the
> postmaster to consult, one shadowing each of these tables.

Good ideas.

--  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://www.op.net/~candle pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610)
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